Pretentious or not?

Stop using the word pretentious, please I beg you. At this point the word has lost all its meaning a long time ago. People keep using and they keep using it wrong in my opinion. The word gets tossed out when it comes to art and especially movies. Some books might be called pretentious or some games, but the vast majority of times people aim it towards movies especially. 

Have you ever heard of music being labeled as pretentious? No, me neither. Movies on the other hand get labeled pretentious all the time. At this point, people aren’t even using it right, when people use the word these days I often think back to a quote in the princess bride. “I don’t think it means what you think it means.”  Now let’s take the real definition. 

“trying to appear or sound more important or clever than you are, especially in matters of art and literature.”

When people use the word 9 times out of 10 they mean arthouse movies. It’s often David Lynch, Standly Kubric or some other innovative filmmakers people claim to be pretentious. These two directories clearly have a distinctive way of making films, but they also have a vision, and should you chose to analyze their films you would find a lot and I mean A LOT of substance and this is not what pretentious is like, a real example of a pretentious director would be M Night Shyamalan. 

So next time you see a slow, dull film that does not make sense at all. Don’t instinctively call it pretentious unless you have the scholarly background to comment on the work, or unless you are one hundred percent sure you know what you are talking about. Just call it boring and slow or whatever you feel regarding the film, but don’t just call it pretentious instinctually since there is a large chance that you are wrong. 

It is also hard to prove if something is pretentious, the best you can hope for is a discussion, but the discourse will more likely than not be about defining the word pretentious more than on the film. 

Pretentious has a bit of a negative connotation to it at least historically, but now I hear people use it to describe things that are out of the norm and a bit artsy. 

Okay, I am going to talk about linguistics now and why words are important, to think it has come to this. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein says that language works by triggering pictures of things in the real world. So if I say the word bear you might think of a grizzly bear, a polar bear, or Winnie the pooh, but if you think of a bowling ball then communication breaks down. 

Pretentious doesn’t really correlate to something in the real world; the word has therefore been latched onto the type of slow, intellectual films. However, this still means the word is being used wrong. 

It is important to use the right words otherwise communication becomes impossible. The problem with this whole Pretentious rant that I am on is not so much that I fear communication breaking down, more than it is about me being annoyed by people using the wrong words. 

 

We all have to follow the same rules when it comes to language and words, otherwise a blog becomes meaningless, and I for some reason do not wish that to happen.